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Month: July 2016

On my 28th birthday, February 6, 1995, God’s angel appeared to me and I saw a vision.

I saw I was entering a room. There were two beds in that room. The far bed was not aligned at right angle with the wall.

My father was sleeping on it. I turned and looked at the other bed. It was correctly aligned with the wall. My mom was sleeping on that bed.

I exited the room into the corridor. I saw a plate on the opposite wall with the word ‘Allopathy’ written on it.

Then I woke up.

I knew it was an evil dream and I didn’t find the courage to tell mom whom I loved & respected so crazily since early childhood. My father was hit by a car and died instantly in early November, 1994.

After some thinking, I decided to tell my dream to my older sister. She fool went ahead and told mom, who had been bed-ridden since 6 months.

She came back to tell me my mom wanted to see me. I was taken by surprise and was dumbfounded.

My mom asked me to tell her the dream (my elder sister is a poor witness and mixes up things). I told my mom the evil prophecy in toto.

She didn’t utter a word.

She just closed her eyes to have some rest.

I sometimes wish I had the ability to tell lies but I don’t.

After a couple of days, Hamid, my best enemy, asked me to take him to a clinic where he thought we could find a sympathetic & learned physician who’d agree to see a patient in her house.

We indeed found an Egyptian physician who examined our mom and advised us to take her to a good hospital that had laboratories and operation theatre for heart patients as he reckoned she was having a cardiac insufficiency problem.

But when Hamid talked mom into going to nearby New Jeddah Clinic Hospital, she panicked and pleaded to let her die among her children, not alone in a hospital.

But Hamid had a winning argument and we all agreed because we really wanted to get her treated. It’s very painful to see your loved one suffering without being able to help it.

I took Hamid to the post office and we sent one telex to our younger brother, Rashid, who was studying in Istanbul University and another to our oldest brother, Abid, who had moved to Pakistan since 1992.

They both came to see mom but by that time, our mom had cooled off and she asked Rashid to go back to his studies and not worry.

My older sister had volunteered to stay with mom so that she won’t feel alone.

By fourth day, her condition had improved and stabilized but they had been unable to find a replacement heart yet.

My elder sister wanted to go home till evening to do the laundry and mom consented.

I dropped my sister at home and went to my job. We had given the Hospital my phone number as I was the only one with a direct line (no extension numbers).

At 2:41pm, I received a call from the Hospital informing me of my mom’s death.

Her lungs were filling with fluids due to cardiac insufficiency. She suffered a sudden attack, was rushed to ICU but they couldn’t save her.

Before going to see mom, I contacted Hamid and Zakir and rushed to the Hospital but both of them got delayed and according to the wicked prophecy, I was the first to arrive and I felt stinging pain because she died gasping for some air.

She kind of drowned.

After more than 21 years, I still carry this wound. I blame myself for my mom’s lonely death in a hospital.

My God does strange things to me.

What kind of a birthday gift was that?

“Look into the MIRROR (Bible) and you shall see the face (Jesus) that tells you: I love you, I’ll kill you. But I’ll love you forever” ~ Enigma.

And I used to live in a beautiful garden in Greece that belonged to my father while my mother…

I had no mother!

Maybe that’s why I used to feel sad & blue.

On one beautiful day, I found part of me lying down in the middle of the garden, near the Laboratories, my favorite place that I used to frequent.

That garden I used to call Eden.

The local Greeks translated “Eden” to mean “school”. Wise Greeks.

It had a spring that divided into four rivers.

I called the first Pihon. I called the second Gihon. The third I called Haddekah and I called the last Euphrates. Don’t confuse them with current rivers and places with similar names!

I called one place in that garden Havilah. It had a mine of gold, and that gold was good (useful). We now call it “iron”. The dawn of Iron Age!

Another part, I called Cush. It was a forest. All kinds of animals used to live there. It was scenic. Even picture-perfect.

Then there was Syria. It had all kinds of edible fruits. And there was Assyria, a field of herbs and grains.

Now I had a problem.

I wanted that part of my body back in me.

But I couldn’t.

Or should I say “we couldn’t”? because she turned out to be a complete person.. but with some beautiful curves.

I called her “woman” because she was taken from me, the “man”.

Now she seemed to love me more than I loved her. She was better than me.

Funny woman.

She used to make me feel ashamed and I wanted to please her as much as she used to please me with every move, every pose and every utterance of hers.

I wanted to please her.

No, I wanted to impress her. I wanted to be better than her.

She had THE MAGIC, something I obviously lacked.

Or at least that’s what I used to think.

A lady won’t tell.

We both wanted the same thing but it was me, not her who couldn’t shake off the Laboratories, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil from my mind.

I was looking for the know-how but she used to call that stuff they used to make “rat poison”.

Yes, rat poison.

She thought if eating or just touching it was going to kill us, it could only mean one thing: rat poison.

She used to hate rats and so did I but the know-how…

I figured that laboratory (whom the woman used to call ‘kitchen’) was somehow going to provide us the know-how.

The cooks there seemed very knowledgeable.

I used to call them serpents because their ways had an air of intimidation.

And I wasn’t totally wrong.

One day, the woman agreed and we went in. A devil came to welcome us and led us to a table.

He had a long list of substances and delicacies. The woman ordered Pizza, lemonade and wine. Unlike me, she was very cautious and didn’t trust anything unless it was pleasant to the sight and good to eat.

The devil told us his food and spices were going to tell us something about our naked bodies and how to join them.

Indeed, we grew up in a matter of minutes and we kissed and learned to become one through mating. It was enjoyable.

The woman became even more beautiful and desirable in my sight.

And that made me feel more miserable as I still failed to impress her as much as she used to impress me.

I went back to the Laboratories.

This time, I went alone.

I asked the devil for more “wisdom” and he gave me a pill. There was something written on that pill. The first letter was a capital V. The second letter was an “i”. The third was an “a”. The fourth was “g”…

“Take this”, said the devil. “Take that pill with this cup of water”.

I swallowed the pill and went back to the woman to impress her.

She was surprised & worried to see my erection. Stupid serpent.

At that time, we heard a voice. Someone was coming. We ran to Syria, THE Garden of Eden, and hid in the fig trees.

But we were relieved when we heard Father’s voice. We weren’t afraid of God. We were afraid of the Greeks.

God didn’t put that laboratory in the middle of Eden to give us troubles. He just didn’t want me, the man, to go there without the woman.

The woman knew her way in the “kitchen” but that place was a death trap for lone men.

It was my fault to go there alone. But in the panic, I blamed my woman for taking me there. The woman had no idea of my lone visit there so she blamed the devil.

I, Adam, failed to follow the instructions and decided to put blind faith in those evil scientists. I should have not gone there alone.

That was the evil. “Evil” means “without Eve” or “Eve-less”.

Hence, I decided to call those laboratories Moon Labs so that it will serve as a reminder that they actually belong to Monia.

He was annoyed to see the computer’s inability to calculate Force. Instead of printing 15.0, it kept printing garbage.

The reason is that computers do not have a memory like ours. They are especially designed to process data in a sequential manner and once they’re done, to forget everything.

So when the computer looks at the above code, it will multiply Mass by Acceleration and store the result in Force.

And at this time, it won’t look at nor see the next two lines where the values of Mass and Acceleration are given. Hence, according to the FORTRAN specifications, it will multiply any garbage value in the memory location assigned to Mass with another garbage in Acceleration, producing yet another garbage that it will store in Force.

The FORTRAN fathers thought up the following solution: give the programmers the ability to create “functions”.

If the FORTRAN compiler comes across a function, it will insert a jump to its code wherever it encounters the name of that function. Thus, the following code will work as expected:

In 1987, he enrolled in a FORTRAN course to crack the puzzle of computer programming.

He got stuck at first assignment.

We used to share the room. After dinner, he asked me if I was interested in learning computer programming.

I was excited.

He gave me a 10 minute introduction and then gave me his assignment to solve.

I wrote a solution. It was slightly different from his solution.

The problem was simple: Given the formula for calculating Force, F=m*a, calculate F, if m=5 and a=3.

This is what my brother wrote:

F = m * a
m = 5
a = 3
write (F)

But the computer won’t understand and kept printing garbage.

Computers process commands sequentially, so I put the values of “m” and “a” first, then the formula to calculate “F”. Like this:

m = 5
a = 3
F = m * a
write (F)

It worked.

Now I have been working on the Programming Puzzle since then.

I went on and tried enrolling in Computer Science but it was off limits for non-Saudis.

I enrolled in a FORTRAN course but I realized it was a very limited language. FORTRAN stands for FORmula TRANslation.

I went to the central library and found a delicious programming book, TRS-80 BASIC With Business Applications.

BASIC provides ability to manipulate more than numbers.

But the problem was how to teach computers to understand Hamid.

What was missing? How could even a child understand things but a computer cannot?

How come even a mosquito knows what it’s doing but billion-dollar machines with AI (Artificial Intelligence) don’t know what they’re doing?

They keep telling us that our brain is a huge neural network so if we keep building larger and larger neural nets (which basically compare two images and tell us how similar or different they are), then eventually, computers will accidentally gain understanding.

Because “intelligence” is a magic to them which comes accidently if we keep building ever larger ANNs (Artificial Neural Nets).

They believe in magic so they proceed like magicians and keep cooking weird stuff that strikes fear and awe in the audience as well as the investors.

So last year, the total investment in AI reached a staggering figure of $8.5 billion.

The most impressive achievement: AlphaGO, a computer that can play GO, a board game.

Does it even know it’s playing a game?

Can it choose not to play or even not to win?

No.

Computers still don’t understand Hamid.

And the scientists are not working on making them understand Hamid.

That’s what’s wrong with AI.

We need to appreciate Hamid’s finding. And work on it as I did since 1987.